{"id":2215,"date":"2004-08-29T11:13:50","date_gmt":"2004-08-29T15:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/08\/29\/2215.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:40","slug":"book-report-the-dragon-quintet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/08\/29\/book-report-the-dragon-quintet\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Dragon Quintet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

YHB read The Dragon Quintet<\/a><\/i> with low expectations, and it pretty much fulfilled them.\n

The novella or novelette or whatever is an awkward form, I think. It’s too long to just be a quick introduction to an idea of a world, a simple story, and out. It’s not long enough to take a lot of pages exploring the world or making the story complicated. Not that there can’t be good novelettes, but I’m more likely to be annoyed by a bad one than by a bad short story. I think.\n

Anyway, this is five “short novels”, two of which are evidently being expanded (or have been expanded) into proper novels. The Mercedes Lackey “Joust” seems like a well-written knockoff of the Pern books, and the Orson Scott Card’s “In the Dragon’s House” is slight and vague. I think they’d both be better as short stories than novels, but then I’m not paying their rent.\n

“Love in a Time of Dragons”, by Tanith Lee is pretty good. It’s well-written, and surprising in places, and sweetly inventive. I should probably read more of her stuff, if this is a good example. On the other hand Elizabeth Moon’s “Judgment” is clumsy and didactic. The dragon dispenses Wisdom (as does the main character’s mother); the point about lying by omission is made over and over again.\n

The best, unexpectedly, was Michael Swanwick’s “King Dragon”. I’d read his novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter<\/I>, which I didn’t much like, and this has some of the sense of that. He does have a facility for brutal juxtaposition of fantasy and technology, like this bit seemingly intended for pull-quotes:\n

Puck’s body, when they dug it up, looked like nothing so much as an enormous black root, twisted and formless. Chanting all the while, the women unwrapped the linen swaddling and washed him down with cow’s urine. They dug out the life-clay that clogged his openings. They placed the finger-bone of a bat beneath his tongue. An egg was broken by his nose and the white slurped down by one medicine woman and the yellow by another.

Finally, they injected him with 5 cc of dextroamphetamine sulfate.<\/blockquote>\n

On the whole, though, it was the metaphor that worked for me, the dragon as heroin, the idea of weakness and strength, and the well-written tight plot. Not that I’m running over to the Swanwick shelf for my next book, but I liked it enough to put him back on my perhaps list.\n

                           ,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

YHB read The Dragon Quintet with low expectations, and it pretty much fulfilled them. The novella or novelette or whatever is an awkward form, I think. It\u2019s too long to just be a quick introduction to an idea of a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17101,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2215\/revisions\/17101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}